Microsoft gets into the virtual lab automation business

The virtual lab automation space has been around for many years now.  Companies like Skytap, Surgient, and VMLogix have all made it their business to manage and control these types of environments.  Virtualization platform giant VMware got into the business as well when it acquired Akimbi, a small lab management startup company, back in June 2006.

[ VMLogix and Citrix have signed a new strategic OEM agreement | Surgient talks about the private cloud as the industry continues to push toward standards ]

Like VMware, Microsoft also now finds itself getting into the lab automation business in hopes of further extending their own virtualization platform and management stack.  Originally announced in November of last year, Microsoft is integrating Visual Studio 2010, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008, and Hyper-V to create its own virtual lab automation solution called, you guessed it, Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.

The product is currently in beta, but the Microsoft team is already blogging about the technology.  It starts off the new blog site by describing the product like so:

On the server side, Lab Management service is one of the many services running inside Team Foundation Server (TFS).  This is what makes the Lab Management solution unique for software testers and developers. Now you can map your lab resources, such as, hosts, virtual machines and storage to Team Project Collections and Team Projects; thus aligning lab hardware needs with the business needs for the projects you are working on.

The lab management service in TFS uses System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) for management of lab infrastructure and provisioning of virtual machines across multiple virtualization platforms. You get a copy of SCVMM with Lab Management.

Microsoft Test and Lab Manager is a Windows Presentation Foundation based rich client.  The Lab Center in Test and Lab Manager allows you to:

• Create and manage virtual or physical environments
• Take environment snapshots or revert to existing snapshots for virtual environments
• Interact with the virtual machines in the environments through environment viewer
• Define test settings for the environments

You can define test plans, test suites, and test cases in the Testing Center and execute them on the lab environments.

And that’s plenty of time for competitor technologies to continue to advance themselves.  So what does this new Microsoft product mean for virtualization lab managers already on the market?  I asked VMLogix that very question, and they had a lot to say.

“We congratulate the Microsoft team on their new product, and believe that their entry simply reinforces the importance and value of the virtual lab automation category,” said Sameer Dholakia, CEO of VMLogix.  “MSFT has done a nice job of tightly tying their Lab Manager to the VSTS suite to virtualization-enable the software development lifecycle — we believe that other ALM providers (HP, IBM Rational) will continue to work closely with partners like VMLogix to enable comparable capabilities.”

Dholakia added, “In terms of the solution itself, we’d encourage customers to compare VMLogix LabManager side-by-side with this new 1.0 product from MSFT.  We’re confident that we continue to have the best-in-class, battle-tested solution.  There are a few clear limitations to MSFT’s Lab Manager that will likely stand out to customers early on:

• For one, our understanding (could be wrong) is that it will only work on Hyper-V in the initial release (slated for early 2010) – VMLogix LabManager, on the other hand, has the broadest virtualization platform support, including VMware AND Hyper-V.  Nearly all of our customers have deployed ESX in their labs today, and will see support of it as a requirement.
• Moreover, its tight integration to VSTS (a strength) will make it difficult-to-impossible for non-VSTS users to easily adopt the solution (a weakness).
• Last, because it’s focused exclusively on the Dev/Test use case, many customers wanting to use the solution for other pre-production use cases (sales demos, training, support, etc.) from the same, centralized, virtual lab will find they need to look at a solution like VMLogix LabManager instead.”

Dholakia also left me with a teaser, saying that VMLogix will be making another announcement in less than two weeks that will further raise the bar on what a complete Virtual Lab solution must provide.  So stay tuned for that one!